Rank 14 and owner of the flag marking me as a member of the Second League… that is really available to anyone who is playing the ranked battles in World of Warships at all. You can’t lose ranks until you get to 14, so unless you just never win a match, you will enter the rarefied heights of the Second League.
Now that I have reached a rank that I could _lose_, I am reluctant to play any more. If I remember right, the next rank, 13, gets some new camouflage, and then 12 gets nothing, and 11 gets some more signal flags. 11 is as far as I can get with my ships — after that, I have to stop. Or buy a premium ship and get boosted into Tier VIII. I don’t see much point in that, though, except as a generator of Free XP for my lower tier ships.
I was sailing terribly in the match that got me into the Second League. The Furutaka is not an an obvious choice for these battles. It has terrible range on its main guns. They are slow to target and slow to turn, though deadly once they do hit. The torpedoes have exceptional range, but if the enemy cruisers are doing their jobs — and in ranked battles, they usually are — then I will be denied decent shots.
So I was dancing in and out of range, trying to lure them into our ambush… and taking a lot of fire. We eventually won on points. Our battleships denied them their capture point, while we were fighting from within ours. Also, they lost points for losing more ships than we lost.
It wasn’t a decisive victory, and I didn’t contribute much to it (except for painting a huge target on my ship’s hull and taking the heat off better ships). But you sail the ship you have.
I did grind a little with the destroyer Isokaze and researched the Minekaze. I still have to research the Furutaka’s third hull before starting work on the new destroyer. To that end, I’ve dropped out of ranked battles for now and begun focusing on regular random battles. I’ll continue the fight for the Second League once the steel beneath that giant target painted on the hull is a little thicker.
